LIVE IT OUT, sapphic second-chance romance told with honesty and beauty

LIVE IT OUT
JENN ALEXANDER
Bywater Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spencer Adams was never expected to be anything more than a high school dropout. She’d been a troubled teen, spending more time at the skate park than in school, at least until her music teacher introduced her to the guitar and music class became her lifeline. Ten years later, she is the guitarist in a band that has become a breakout success, and she wants to use that success to help other teens who have had the same rough start as her. She takes on a volunteer project with local youth as a way of honoring her past, not knowing that it will force her to revisit the one part of her past that she’d hoped to forget.

Faith Siebert has always had high expectations to live up to, and she has tried her best to fulfill those expectations, to be a good daughter, a good student, and a good friend. When she fell for Spencer in high school, she knew her family and friends would never approve. Scared of their reactions, Faith ended things with Spencer, following the path her parents wanted for her, even at the immense personal cost. Of course, it had only been a high school romance, destined for brevity anyway. At least, that’s what she told herself. But when Spencer shows up in her life once again, partnered with Faith on a youth music project, her world is rocked and she is forced to re-examine everything she knows about relationships and herself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not much for rock-star romances, me, but I am a vulturous carrion-seeker for the corpses of heartbreaks past on second-chance narratives. Give me a high-school/college breakup undone decades later and I am on it like a Jane Austen bonnet. Add in the fact that the parties are a same-sex couple denied a natural ending by homophobia (internal or external, makes me no never-mind) and stand back while I run to get it. Didn't hurt your foot, did I?

I got what I was expecting in this read. I loved Spencer's complete willingness to use her skills to help kids in the same bad situation she came from to cope, on many levels, with their sense of powerlessness and absence of agency. True, they won't become rock stars but they will learn how to play a musical intrument...a thing that by itself increases one's satisfaction with one's life.

Faith, the One That Got Away for Spencer, believes it will and is surprised when it's Spencer who shows up to do the teaching. Her career as a social worker is so in-character for the girl she was all the way back in high school, it felt on the nose. I like social workers, and deeply admire their sense of purpose. I'm all in for a redemption arc here, as well, because Spencer's going back to her roots as a shelter-raised kid to extend her hand in helpful practicality.

Do I need to say that these women find their way into a relationship? It's a category romance. Of course they do.

In forming that long-delayed, much-desired romantic reconnection, each of them has to come to terms with her own part in their long estrangement, what it cost them both, and how best to use the rubble of the past to build a good solid foundation. Here is where I felt both the happiest, because the women are truly honest with themselves and each other; and here is also where I felt the length of the book worked against it the most clearly. There wasn;t room to go into the families, or the people they were leaving behind. That was less of an issue, though, than the way the women were ready for that hard, hard, hard task of being vulnerable and honest within their strengthening bond. I can't say it's unlikely...the author's a therapist by trade, she knows better than I do...but I can say that even fifty more pages with some conversations outside their bond would've helped me invest in the resolution.

That said, I give the book as it is a recommendation, tinged with a litte note of caution for the ewww-ick homophobes because there is some steam in here. (I just turned the pages faster.) The story builds its couple's bond well, believably if very quickly, and tells hard emotional truths with honest, sensitive truthfulness.
I'm really glad that Jenn Alexander has more work for me to get acquainted with.

BLACK DIAMOND QUEENS: African American Women and Rock and Roll, another co-opted cultural theft from Black folks

BLACK DIAMOND QUEENS: African American Women and Rock and Roll
MAUREEN MAHON
Duke University Press
$30.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise.

In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers.

By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Get your pearl-clutching hand limbered up, y’all...white men grabbed a narrative and co-opted it again!
I know, I know...no one saw that coming, did they?

What I did not know about the history of women in rock and roll was a LOT. The underhanded way the gatekeepers would routinely mislabel Black women's music as soul or R&B, making it into an audience-awareness choice, reaching the natural market for these women's work, ie other Black folks. This made sure it all looked okay from the outside and still kept them separate from the white audiences that loved their music. Big Mama Thornton recorded major hits for white artists who got them from discovering her versions, eg Elvis re-recording "Hound Dog" after she did it, then refusing ever to acknowledge her as the source of the style and the rendition he made. She never got her public due, her deserved attention, or her merited rewards despite a many-decade career.

There is an entire chapter on the girl groups like the Shirelles and the Supremes, huge cultural forces in their day and now largely ignored or forgotten entirely. Diana Ross might be familiar to some younger folk (likely as a solo act), but neither Florence Ballard nor Mary Wilson are, and that is nigh on criminal neglect! The history of the women who worked behind the stars, and in the session studios, are equally unknown to the broad swath of listeners. Who knows who Merry Clayton is, by name anyway? But listen to the Rolling Stones' absolutely ubiquitous "Gimme Shelter" and they know that voice. An actual human woman, with a career, made those glorious sounds behind Jagger's howl of lust. Women like Claudia Lennear and Minnie Riperton were "muses" for white, famous men, and had tiny fractions of their success.

Of course no one can take a cursory look at this book and fail to see Tina Turner front and center. Rightly so. Her life and career were legendary from the beginning. Every action, every concert, was An Event. A life lived in the glare of publicity, though, is not always a career that works for the aritst. While Tina Turner did find justly given adulation and success for her talents, she worked for everything she ever got *against* the men resisting her input and rejecting her needs and wants. It was not until the 1980s, her fourth decade as a singer, that she finally shed the R&B ghettoization and became a megastar. The fact is that Tina Turner was a musical force of nature, and should have been lionized with the greatest of the British white men who gave the US white audiences covers of the Black women's originals.

I think I learned most from Author Mahon's chapter on Betty Davis, one of Miles Davis' wives. Her astonishing music was a YouTube rathole I had not known existed. Listen to "If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up" and tell me you don't feel deprived that you are hearing it for the first time in the 21st century. That is my—our—loss, and a bitter privation indeed. It slammed home the grotesque waste of Black women's talents and gifts this book was written to highlight.

For this MLK Day of reviews, this read was both fascinating and infuriating. The misogyny, the racism, the sheer hideous waste of so much life force, all left me more hell bent than ever to seek voices, experiences, and talents in as many corners that are not spotlit than ever. Join me and let's start shoutin’ about it.